Question of the Day

How long does it take this AI to find Waldo?

Answer: 4.45 seconds.

Redpepper, a U.S. creative agency, released a video Wednesday of its robot, aptly named There’s Waldo, seeking out and pointing to the character in the classic illustrated books. There’s Waldo is powered by a Raspberry Pi computer and consists of an AI and a robotic arm with a rubber hand with which it points to Waldo once it locates him.

The AI was trained using Google’s Cloud AutoML Vision service. The developers uploaded multiple images of Waldo, so that it would know what to look for. When searching for Waldo, the robot takes a picture of the book and parses out all the faces. The AI then analyzes the faces, and if it is at least 95 percent confident that it has found a match, it tells the arm to point it out.